Sunday, January 8, 2012

2011 Round-Up: Poetry

I’m
not an adept reader of poetry and am too often content to take refuge in those
poems I know well already, but this past year (reader alert: here’s the first
of what may be turn into a few late end-of-year posts), I read more collections
of poetry than usual:

Hapax, by MacArthur “genius” award winner and classics
translator A. E. Stallings - certainly among my favorite contemporary poetry
discoveries of recent years. At a dinner the day after I’d finished the
book, I annoyingly interrupted several times to exclaim, “Hey, I just read a
great poem about exactly that [thing,
whatever we all happened to be discussing at the moment].” Stallings’
penetrating observations, tremendous energy and wit rapturously rattle the
cages of the neo-classical formalism of her poems, which traverse subjects as varied
as arrowheads, sonograms, first love, mint, marriage, eccentric museums, insomnia,
thyme, bats. Really? A fantastic poem about bats? I loved this book.

The Half-Finished
Heaven and Other Poems by 2011
Nobel Prize winner, Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly).
Tranströmer’s crystalline, philosophical and often highly moving poems that
intimately touch on moments of critical decision and reflection made this poet another
favorite new discovery.

The revelatory, free-form,
often monumental poems of Syrian poet Adonis (a runner-up for the Nobel Prize) in
his first major collection to appear in English, Adonis: Selected Poems
(translated by Khaled Mattawa), which opened up a new and vast world to me. I’ve
yet to finish this rich volume, which demands slow and patient reading, but am
drawn to Adonis as I was to one of my old favorites, St. John Perse, whose
poems Adonis, not coincidentally, was the first to translate into Arabic (thanks to M. Lynx Qualey at Arablit for posting on Adonis).

The overblown,
internationalist mythos of Frederic Prokosch’s first book of poetry, Assassins
– again, echoes of St. John Perse, but difficult to read with a straight face
after exposure to Louise Bogan’s delicious parody in “Imitation of a Poem by
Frederic Prokosch.”[1]

American nouveau-Beat
poet (could I, should I call him that?) John Beer’s audaciously-titled and
audaciously-constructed collection, The Waste Land.

The lean, graceful,
homo-erotically charged “songs” of early 20th century Portuguese
poet António Botto in The Songs of António Botto, translated into
English by his better known friend, Fernando Pessoa (thanks to Tom at Wuthering Expectations for alerting me to Botto’s poems).

She Says, by Vénus Khoury-Ghata, a ravishingly beautiful
collection of densely surreal and opaque poems filtering Khoury-Ghata’s Lebanese
background through expatriate life in France, and her Arabic through her French
(and through translator Marilyn Hacker’s glittering English). I marveled at
Khoury-Ghata’s daring, striking combinations of images, as well as at her
ability to employ a dazzling surface opacity while exploring the disruptions of
living suspended between two cultures and languages – and the complications of accessing,
in exile, privileges that would have been denied to her as a woman in her
native country.

Winning in the “Most
Unusual” category: Gwyneth Lewis’ Keeping Mum (brought to my attention
by Philip Gross’ brief mention in The
Guardian in an article on “writing at the edge of silence”). Lewis also
explores the perils of living between two languages. The title is an obvious
play on words between the metaphorical meaning of remaining silent and the
British shorthand for “mother,” clever for a work explicitly about Lewis’
relationship with her endangered mother tongue, Welsh. Lewis writes one book in
Welsh which she then uses as a springboard for another in English, allowing
such full play in the act of translating her own words that the English product
differs almost completely from its Welsh progenitor (leaving only readers of
Welsh privy to the differences). The pattern converges thematically in Keeping
Mum, in which Lewis uses her English to interrogate her Welsh, quite
literally (literarily) in that the collection becomes a sort of detective story
about the murder of the Welsh language, starring a detective/translator, a kind
of forensic psychiatrist, and a coterie of angels. Both playful and sober, and
written in a variety of mostly formalist styles, Lewis’ poems pull together elements
of criminal interrogation and psychiatry, disorders of language, the proximal
bleeding across membranes of the languages one knows, the responsibility of the
writer towards conserving and deepening language, and the complications of
sourcing poetic inspiration by appealing to a kind of estrangement and disarrangement
of the personality. I admired the overarching, novelistic conceit of Keeping
Mum, since so many poetry collections lack a unifying element. My favorite
line in Lewis’ book, though, came not from her poems, but from her
introduction, in which she notes that revisiting the Welsh book that preceded Keeping
Mum produced several “entirely new” poems in English that she refers to as “translations
without an original text – perhaps a useful definition of poetry” - and perhaps
a useful thought for anyone interested in translation.

Finally, “poetic” if not
strictly “poetry,” I’ll include Ursula Molinaro and John Evans’ pastiche of
elements found in a trash can and reassembled into Remnants of an Unknown
Woman; Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch’s experimental collision between a
microphone, two conversing friends, and the streets of Manhattan in Ten
Walks/Two Talks (a peculiar, clever and fun book, but in my lowbrow
response I couldn’t get out of my head Beavis and Butthead’s description of a
Beck video as like something from “one of those dudes from the gifted class”); and
Harry Mathew’s semi-poetic, joyful vision of a world in the ecstatic throes of
masturbation in Singular Pleasures. Rounding out the year was Fernando
Pessoa’s tremendous magnum opus The Book of Disquiet, a constant
companion for two months. Though Pessoa himself addresses the distinction
between poetry and prose, I couldn’t shake the sense that this complex,
difficult to define work came across more as poetry than anything else. Let’s
say “poeticized prose,” a term cribbed from translator Richard Zenith’s
introduction. More about that towards the end of March, as part of the Portuguese Reading Challenge hosted by Wuthering Expectations.

Thank you for that "enough." One Perse poem seems to me almost interchangeable with another (sacrilege!), and Anabasis is as good a work as any of his to read - though I find myself partial to Amers (Seamarks) for some reason. Also, though I can't seem to locate them now, I recall reading letters Perse wrote from Peking when he was a diplomat there after World War I and finding them a fascinating look at a Westerner grappling to make sense of the place.

It's one of my plans this year to read more poetry. I tend to read the ones I know again and very rarely modern poems. This is a great list and the descriptions help me to get a feel for them. There are quite a lot I'd like to explore.

Hi.I just discovered your blog, I was searching for a review of Rosa Candida. I'm impressed & estatic % happy, there are so many books here that I will discover this year! I love your indepth analysis and your style. I can't trust official book reviews anymore, I'm really tired or them(like the NYT or NYRB or The Guardian) I want to discover authors, from different times and countries...

Caroline - Well, I can only applaud that goal (it's one of mine as well). While I'm generally partial to novels, I found these explorations tremendously rewarding - despite my limitations in understanding some of the work.

Fantastica - Thanks! I'm glad you stopped by and found the site worthwhile.